Watching the Knicks punch their ticket to the NBA Finals has, in my opinion, sucked.
Yes, they’ve waited 27 years to return to this stage, endured truly awful stretches of basketball spanning decades, and maybe deserve it on some level. Still, it’s New York. It’s Knicks fans. It’s “bing bong” and Timothée Chalamet clips that will infiltrate your timelines for the next two weeks.
But spending this much time looking at the Knicks has made me appreciate how different Boston’s story has been.
The Knicks built their team from the outside in. They deserve…credit for it, as physically painful as that sentence is to type. They made trades, found the right veterans, identified the right fits, bet big on a team identity, and kept pushing until they finally broke through.
Boston’s path has looked very different.
The Celtics’ best era since the Big Three started with two draft cards.
Jaylen Brown, third overall in 2016. Jayson Tatum, third overall in 2017. Two swings near the top of the draft, both connected cleanly enough to change the next decade of Celtics basketball.
It’s a story we’re all familiar with, and one that feels simple and obvious in retrospect. It wasn’t. Brown was booed on Draft Night. Tatum arrived after Boston traded out of the No. 1 pick and trusted its board, going as far as to preemptively protect themselves from criticism for doing so. There were years of debates about whether they could play together, whether they liked each other enough, whether one had to go, whether the partnership had a ceiling, whether the Celtics were being too patient or not patient enough.
Then, they won the title.
And somehow, two years later, we’re back to asking whether the Jays era has underachieved.
The standard is still the standard
The Celtics are and should be held to a ridiculous standard. That’s part of the deal here in Boston.
This franchise is strictly focused on banners, not vibes, which is why a first-round exit after blowing a 3-1 lead to Philadelphia was and is awful. It should still bother people. I know it still bothers me.
Noa Dalzell, Senior Writer here at CelticsBlog, put it well on her latest episode of You Got Boston. She said she is “not excusing their loss this past season,” adding, “They should not have blown a 3-1 lead.” That is the correct baseline. The Celtics were too good and too well-positioned to lose that series, even in a season that plenty of people spent months calling a gap year.
The issue is what happens after the disappointment settles in. A bad ending has a way of walking backward through time and staining everything before it. Suddenly a decade of contention becomes a decade of missed chances. A title becomes “only one.” Deep playoff runs become evidence for prosecution.
Noa pushed back on that framing too, saying, “If you say that they underachieved, then everybody has underachieved except for the Golden State Warriors since 2015.”
She’s right. Since 2015, the Warriors are the only franchise to win multiple titles.
Granted, not every team should be graded the same way. Some cores are better positioned for sustained excellence, like the modern-day Thunder or the aforementioned Warriors. Some titles feel more like the product of having the right pieces in the right place for one magical run, like the Kawhi-led Raptors or the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks.
But the larger point holds. Ever since the Warriors dynasty ended, no one has been able to stack chips.
If the argument is that every great player or duo who fails to become a dynasty has failed, then nearly the entire league has spent the last decade failing.
That’s a pretty miserable way to watch basketball.
The résumé grew quickly and quietly
One strange thing about the Tatum-Brown era is how quickly winning became background noise in their larger story.
By the time they broke through in 2024, the Celtics had already been to four conference finals with Tatum and Brown together, plus the 2022 NBA Finals. They had made the playoffs every year of Tatum’s career. They had never finished below .500 with both of them on the roster. Tatum had already made five All-Star teams and four All-NBA teams, while Brown had three All-Star selections, and an All-NBA nod.
Even this season, which started under the shadow of Tatum’s Achilles tear, somehow became another reminder of how high this group’s floor has been. Brown stepped into the heaviest version of his role yet and led the Celtics to a 56-win season. That is not normal. Most teams lose a player like Tatum and spend the season looking like someone unplugged the router. Instead, Boston stayed in the mix to the point where it felt like just another normal season of winning in a very abnormal year.
Boston has gotten so used to deep runs that fans sometimes treat them like table stakes. The conference finals became a place the Celtics were supposed to be every year, like it was some recurring calendar invite. That is an absurd privilege.
There are fanbases that spend decades hoping to draft one player as good as Brown or Tatum. Boston got both in back-to-back years. Then, they both stayed. Then, they improved. Then, they won it all, together.
A lot of Celtics fans are old enough to remember when the present felt bad and the future looked worse.
The late 90s were ugly. The early 2000s had Paul Pierce trying to drag half-built rosters into relevance while the rest of us tried to convince ourselves that maybe this was the year everything finally clicked for Mark Blount. Before Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen arrived, plenty of seasons felt like they were over before Thanksgiving. There’s a different kind of frustration that comes with watching a contender fall short, but at least that frustration comes from proximity to something real.
The Tatum-Brown era has offered a level of annual belief that younger fans may not realize is rare. In the words of Joni Mitchell, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.
The Celtics nailed the picks that mattered
The draft-history context makes this point even clearer.
Over the last twelve drafts, Boston has had plenty of misses. James Young. Guerschon Yabusele. Romeo Langford. The Desmond Bane trade. Plenty of second-rounders who barely created a ripple in the fabric of Celtics history. Boston has taken a lot of bites at the apple, and some of those bites were just teeth hitting the core.
But they nailed the picks that could end up defining an era of the most storied franchise in NBA history.
Brown at No. 3. Tatum at No. 3. Marcus Smart at No. 6 before them. Payton Pritchard at No. 26. Robert Williams at No. 27. More recently, Boston has been trying to squeeze value out of late picks like Jordan Walsh, Baylor Scheierman, and Hugo Gonzalez.
That’s a different kind of roster-building than what we’re seeing from the Knicks right now. New York’s current Finals team was largely assembled via trades and free agency. Again, credit to them. Building a winner through trades and targeted additions is still hard, even if being based in New York City probably helps more than being based in a place where the free-agent pitch begins with, “Hear me out.” Ask the Suns how easy it is to just put expensive names together and hope the basketball gods carry you to the promised land.
Boston’s identity, though they’ve lost key pillars like Smart and Williams over the years, still runs through the two guys it drafted and developed.
BROOKLYN, NY – NOVEMBER 14: (NEW YORK DAILIES OUT) Jayson Tatum #0 and Jaylen Brown #7 of the Boston Celtics in action against the Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center on November 14, 2017 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The Celtics defeated the Nets 109-102. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images) Getty Images
There should be a specific satisfaction in that. How great has it been to watch Brown’s handle tighten over the years, even after it became the internet’s favorite easy joke? What about watching Tatum go from smooth, unassuming scorer to an all-around forward who can defend, rebound, pass and carry like one of the league’s best? Don’t you remember that feeling of people saying the partnership had run its course, then seeing those same two players standing on a parade duck boat together?
The Celtics didn’t rent this era. They raised it.
Maybe that’s why the frustration can hit so hard in seasons like this. Fans remember the whole thing. The early flashes. The blown leads. The Kyrie mess. The bubble. The 2022 Finals. The 2023 faceplant against Miami. The Porzingis and Jrue trades. The breakthrough. The latest playoff collapse. It all lives in the same folder.
But the folder is still mostly full of winning.
Boston drafted the stars everyone wants. Then we got used to them.
If a time traveler had explained this era to Celtics fans the night Pierce and Garnett were traded to Brooklyn, nobody would have complained.
Five conference finals appearances together, two NBA Finals appearances, one championship, no seasons finishing worse than .500? Every Celtics fan would have signed up immediately. Some probably would have asked if the person delivering this prophecy needed a ride to Logan and whether the Harlem Shake was still prospering.
Living through success changes how it feels. The wins stop surprising you. The conference finals start feeling like your right versus your reward. The flaws become more irritating because the stakes are higher. The losses feel like theft.
That is what Tatum and Brown have done to us. They made winning feel normal.
The Celtics should keep chasing more because this era deserves that urgency. This season showed how much Brown can shoulder without Tatum, but it also showed how fragile any title path becomes when one of the two pillars is missing. Tatum and Brown are expensive now. The cap is tighter. The roster needs work. The center spot needs clarity. The East is not waiting around for Boston to feel sentimental.
Still, any conversation about what comes next should start from an honest place.
The Jays era has not been perfect. There are fair arguments that more than one banner should have been raised by now. Still, this era has given Celtics fans one of the best homegrown runs in modern franchise history.
Someday down the road, the Celtics will be searching for the next version of this. That’s probably when we’ll understand how much fun this era really was.